Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios

Sebastian Barrios reveals how Mercado Libre runs 18,000 engineers with 95% fewer PMs than peers and 30,000 daily deploys.

• Mercado Libre has only ~1,000 PMs for 18,000 engineers (~5% ratio vs. 10-30% industry norm), with engineering leads owning product decisions.
• The company ships 30,000 production changes per day across microservices, config, and DB updates — more than one per engineer daily.
• An internal AI platform called Verdi lets agents compose existing microservices into new end-to-end features with UI, without writing new code.
• Mercado Libre delivers 5 million packages per day using its own planes, trucks, and distribution network across Latin America.
• Teams operate without cascaded OKRs; leadership sets high-level direction and delegates everything else, with tight feedback via product reviews rather than top-down mandates.
• At 17, Barrios received a personal call from Steve Jobs removing his battery-drain app from the App Store — prompting Apple to add a new rule against excessive battery drain.
• At 19, Barrios built a 5-minute call timer app that hit #1 in 19 countries with no backend, no ads, and near-100% margin, then parlayed it into a taxi app competing with Uber in Mexico City.

2025-06-08 · Watch on YouTube